The longer I’m in this business, the more I realize how important it is to mentor younger journalists. Perhaps it’s the most important thing we can do as leaders, whether we’re extroverts or introverts. These young people are brave souls for getting into the news business at this time. Some jaded folks would call them naïve and foolhardy, but I don’t see that.

For example, if you have a reporter covering a huge parade, a bike tour, travelling along the coastline, taking a wine tour across the country, or you want to collect reader photos from a highway closure — really, the use cases are endless — an easy way to get interactive, live content from the field is through a Flickr map. And, you can accomplish it all from email, with no extra apps or training required.

The Associated Press says that it will start offering additional credit to other news organizations when it picks up their stories for the AP wire. This change — starting August 1 — will be noticeable mainly on the websites of AP’s member newspapers and other sites that offer AP State News Reports. A memo from Mike Oreskes, AP’s senior managing editor for U.S. news, is after the jump.

How many times have you seen a website say "We're not responsible for the content of our comments."? I know that when you webmasters put that up on your sites, you're trying to address your legal obligation. Well, let me tell you about your moral obligation: Hell yes, you are responsible. You absolutely are. When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault.

For most of the last two million years, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers who worked in teams to find fruits, roots and seeds and to capture animals to eat. Among contemporary hunter-gatherers, folks who don’t collaborate or share well are either shunned as foraging partners or ridiculed.

Around the world, TruePosition markets something it calls “location intelligence,” or LOCINT, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. As a homeland security tool, it’s enticing. Imagine an “invisible barrier around sensitive sites like critical infrastructure,” such as oil refineries or power plants, TruePosition’s director of marketing, Brian Varano, tells Danger Room. The barrier contains a list of known phones belonging to people who work there, allowing them to pass freely through the covered radius. “If any phone enters that is not on the authorized list, [authorities] are immediately notified.”

Can you guess which major media outlet scored the highest? It was the Guardian, in the UK. Next in line for most engagement per unique visitor were Slate, The New York Times, the BBC and The Economist. See below for a chart displaying the top 30.

This is the debut of a regular feature: a collection of the week’s best long-form journalism published in The Times, as selected by our editors. We will also include one pick from The Times’s archives.

If you want to get an idea of what I've been up to this year, here are some highlights — posts on issues and topics that have been central to my work, along with interviews with specific news organizations. I've endeavored to figure out what journalists mean when they talk about engagement, what's working for them and how they know if they're succeeding.

The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

No newspaper WANTS to print a lie. It's expensive, we hate paying court costs, and we'd far rather spend the cash on the Christmas party or maybe even stories. Mistakes happen nevertheless and there are plenty of blogs and interested parties pointing it out when they do – as they should, although they are rather monotone and never praise a paper for getting something right.

Improving reporters’ and editors’ skills, while raising their energy level and spurring motivation, can mean the difference between a news organization successfully reinventing itself and one that doesn’t.